Boon

by Ed Kurtz

  Somewhere between the shot and the end of Boon’s heart-wrenching scream, the lamp dropped to the hard rock at our feet and shattered. I was still blinking away the spots in my eyes from the muzzle flash when the oil spilled out and the flame filled its shape, an amorphous blob between Boon and Stanley. His gun was on her.

  But Boon was faster.

  She first shot him in the forearm, the bullet tearing through tendons and forcing him to lose his grip on the pistol. The look of absolute horror on his face, lit only from the guttering fire on the floor, was ghostly. If he had kept abreast of her movements over the years as he attested, he must have heard how fast she was. The rotten bastard was just too damned arrogant to believe she was fast enough.

  But she was.

  Her next shot slammed into his left hip. He roared with shock and pain, dancing absurdly to shift his weight to the right and spinning round until he collapsed in a heap to the ground.

  I realized my hand was reaching for the rifle at my feet and let it hang. This had nothing to do with me and my help was not needed.

  Stanley struggled to get back up. He growled when his hip shifted and cried out when he tried to brace himself with his right arm. Boon kept her .44 on him and watched, her eyes afire and jaw clenched tight. She looked every bit the demon from hell, come to reclaim one of its worst.

  “You bitch,” he seethed. “You cunt.”

  He found a way to drag himself forward with his elbow and good hand, careful to keep his weight on his right side. He bared his golden teeth like a feral creature. The blood soaking through his shirtsleeve and trousers shone wetly in the firelight. Inch by inch he slithered closer to the gun he’d dropped.

  Boon said, “I’m the worst bitch you ever met, and you’ll never meet another.”

  She aimed carefully and squeezed off another shot, this time striking his right knee. I thought I heard a pop when the bullet lodged itself there. Stanley shrieked pitifully and dropped flat on his belly, weeping with pain and anger.

  “Just do it, you heartless witch,” he said. “Get it fucking over with.”

  Next she pointed the Colt somewhere at his midsection, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber. Almost dispassionately, she opened up the cylinder, saw that she was out of balls, and reholstered the gun. Without a word I squatted to pick up the repeater to hand it off to her, but instead of taking it she swept down to draw the knife from my boot.

  I whispered her name and she paused on her way back to Stanley, breathing so hard her back seemed to swell. The fire on the ground was beginning to die out. She looked at me over her shoulder and said, “Go now.”

  I nodded and moved to where Meihui lay in the shadows, outside of the meager light. Boon reached out and grabbed my hand.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll bring her out.”

  “All right, Boon.”

  “Go.”

  “All right.”

  She turned the hilt of my knife in her hand so that the blade gleamed. Stanley grunted and said, “Listen to me, Splettstoesser. This woman is crazy. She will kill you too and never think twice of it. Help me now and I will make it worth your while.”

  I said, “Kiss my fat ass, Arthur Stanley.”

  Boon lurched to him, grabbed a fistful of his hair and drove the blade into his shoulder. More pain, nothing fatal. She intended to take her time with him. Realizing this, Stanley screamed, his eyes glazed over with the tears that poured from them, and I listened to him go on screaming as I made my way back to the main shaft to find my way out.

  Jesus, how he screamed.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The campfire was still burning when I emerged from the mine and the first light of morning was starting to glow on the horizon. I’d already sat down by the fire before it dawned on me that the man Boon left to die was gone. Either he wasn’t in the dire straits he thought, or he’d managed to crawl someplace else to croak. I really couldn’t be too fussed to think about it. For a short while longer I could still hear the high, desperate screams from deep in the shaft, so mostly I thought about that. About what she was doing to the man she’d waited so long to kill. Her father, except in the sense that he wasn’t. Just like he’d said. Nobody was wrong all the time.

  And when the screaming stopped and all I could hear anymore was the crackle of the campfire and the song of the morning birds in the tall California trees, my thoughts turned precisely where I wanted them least to go—to Meihui.

  Poor, sweet Meihui. She might have turned down a path like Boon’s, or she might not’ve. I supposed life was riddled with thousands of paths, not just one or two, and it took a hell of a lot of different choices and circumstances to end up anyplace in particular. There was no telling where a kid like her might have gone, and no sense dwelling on it now. She was gone, killed by the man who probably paid to own her like a doll or a dog. That he paid the price did nothing to ease the pain I felt in my chest about it. Stanley’s death would never undo it, would never bring her back.

  In spite of my grandest effort not to, I lay my face in my two hands and sobbed. My heart hurt so badly I might have reckoned I was dying if I hadn’t known it was just the loss. The limit, really. The limit of how much, after all the years on the trails and roads and railways with Boonsri, that I could take. I’d taken a lot, and I’d caused my fair share of horror and heartache along the way. I was puzzled when she hauled us clear back to that lonesome grave to mourn the boy she’d shot but mayhap she had limits, too. Degrees of limits, I supposed, that both hardened the heart as she went along but chipped away at it, too. Now that I studied on it, my own heart had taken quite the beating as well. Of all the nasty things I’d bore witness to in my days, it was that fraction of a second when the Englishman’s muzzle flashed that I regretted the most, then and forever. That sight was my last limit. Any more chips to the cold stone in my chest would be the end of me.

  I was done.

  The sun rose, uninterested in what the night had borne, and I got to rifling through the camp in search of victuals and vice. I came away with half a dozen hand-rolled cigarettes, a quarter-full, unlabeled bottle of something brown, some hard biscuits and a bit of pemmican jerky. Back at the fire I ate and smoked and drank, but none of it was sufficient to fill the hole opened up inside of me. Later, I wept a little more. Later still, I started to doze right there on the scrub and dust and scratchy pine needles that carpeted the ground.

  Boon came back sometime after that. I must have sensed the movement because I hadn’t heard a thing, but I turned to look at the mouth of the mineshaft just as she appeared from its shadows. The front of her was awash in dark, drying blood. Her long, black hair hung in oily ropes over her face and down her shoulders. In her arms, the small, lifeless body of Meihui dangled. She looked like she did not weigh anything at all, even less than she had in life. Like the emptiness her death left behind took every substantial about her. Everything real.

  I said, “Howdy, Boon.”

  She said nothing. Just stopped once she was fully in the sunlight and closed her eyes for a few moments. I watched her. The campfire was dying out by then, just embers. Boon opened her eyes and walked on, past me and into the camp, where she ducked into one of the tents with Meihui. She was in there for a little while. I smoked. When she came out again, she carried with her a bundle. I had to look at it a minute to tell that she’d wrapped Meihui up in a bedroll and tied it up with twine. She didn’t have to tell me it was to keep from turning into the sort of gruesome thing the late Bartholomew Dejasu had become, drawing blackflies behind her saddle on the ride down to Darling.

  Boon lay her down on the ground to catch her breath and roll the knots out of her back and shoulders. She was starting to cry, but soundlessly and without so much as curling her lip or wrinkling her nose. Just water running down her filthy cheeks, and her like she hadn’t even noticed it. She hauled the body back up into her arms and continued on, through and past the camp, into the dense trees that marked the boundary between the mine
and the ghost town we’d mostly burned to the ground, just like Red Foot before it.

  I waited a bit longer, just to see if she’d come back for me. She didn’t, so I rose back up, smarting head to toe and probably still bleeding here and there, and limped the way she’d gone. On the other side of the stand of trees, I found one of the two mounts she’d ground-tied behind the hotel. The other was gone, and so was Boon.

  I saddled up, which took a few failed attempts before I made it, and rode alongside the smoldering remains of the hotel and the farrier’s, glancing over at the dead, burnt mules and all the men’s corpses splayed in the street and covered with flies. I squinted in the bright morning light and looked straight down the road that led out of what used to be Handsome Frank, California. In the middle distance was a small black shadow shrinking into the hazy, shimmering horizon. I gigged the mount with the heel of my boot and followed.

  It was past noon before I got within hailing distance. I called out to her, but she did not acknowledge me. She just rode at a fair clip, me maybe a quarter mile behind. I kept that distance between us, more or less, until we got back to Burnside, where I got buffaloed by old Arthur Stanley, who I reckoned now lay in pieces scattered in worthless hole in the ground.

  Boon’s mount was hitched up at a rail between a general store and what I took for an undertaker’s given the fresh pine boxes on display out front. She was not in sight. Neither was Meihui’s body. I hitched up, too. And I waited outside, trying not to think about anything at all.

  In my haste to catch up with her, I’d left the bottle and the tobacco makings back at the miner’s camp. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, looking for stray coins to spend at the general store, when the shouting erupted inside the undertaker’s. A lamplighter in the street rushed over to get a look through one of the two glass windows in the front of the place. At the same time, someone smashed right through the other one, slamming against the porch in a tinkling rain of glass and rolling off into the grass. Boon appeared in the broken window, her fists balled up at her sides.

  Seeing me, she said, “Won’t bury the girl proper on account of she’s Chinese.”

  “God Almighty,” the bruised and bloodied undertaken said. He scrambled to get to his feet. “It’s nothing personal.” He looked around in a panic and alighted on me. “Fetch the marshal, would you?”

  I shook my head, but the lamplighter fell into a clumsy sprint down the street. Boon heaved a sigh and vanished from view. She reappeared at the front door, the bundle back in her arms, and on her way to where she’d hitched up, she delivered a sound kick to the undertaker’s shin. He dropped back to the ground.

  “To hell with this place,” she said, and she set lashing the body back up on her mount.

  There were some raised voices and milling about, and a crowd of onlookers began to form in the street while Boon and I climbed back onto our saddles and turned back out of Burnside, this time together. I kept looking back for an hour or so after we cleared the town, but nobody gave chase. We camped rough that night and only because it was too dark to keep on and risk one or both of the horses stepping in some critter’s hole and breaking a leg. The only thing I said the whole night was, “I am sure sorry things went this way.”

  She said nothing at all.

  I dropped into sleep before she did, and I slept fitfully. At dawn I awoke with a full bladder and hardly looked one way or the other before taking care of business on some coyote brush. Once that was done and I had my trousers buttoned up, I turned ’round to discover that there was only the one horse hobbled nearby.

  Boon was gone.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  It was a lot of years before I ever saw Boonsri Angchuan again, though I thought of her often. Practically every minute of every day at first, later quite damn frequently. After the first couple of years I started to go decent stretches without thinking of her at all when out of the blue she’d be right there again, front and center in my mind for no particular reason at all. I did not seek her out, asking after everyplace I roamed as she had in search of Arthur Stanley, but I did keep my eyes peeled and my ear to the ground. A woman like that did not go unnoticed, though I managed to travel entirely different circuits than she and heard nothing of interest in that regard. For a long time, I presumed she had to have either died or left the country. Either of those potential outcomes led me into a dreadful state of melancholy, which inevitably led me to the bottom of a bottle. I spent a right smart of those kind of nights in jail cells. When I got sick of the insides of jails I rode the chuck lines, meandering from one ranch house to another, looking for handouts and something warm in my belly. Montana, Wyoming in the summer. Back down to Texas, Indian Territory, Kansas in the wintertime. Spent a spell back in Arkansas. Both my folks long dead and buried. A brother gone off but no one knew where. Thought about staying put, doing some honest work for a change, but I was long past too old to change. I was just killing time until time killed me.

  I was well north of fifty leaning against the bar in an Arizona border town cantina, not fifty miles from where old Geronimo finally surrendered to General Miles a few months earlier, wagging my chin with the Mex bartender when a vaguely familiar voice said, “Shut up, Edward Splettstoesser.”

  A little huskier than I remembered, and when I craned my neck to see her, a bit rounder at the middle, too. Hell’s bells, who wasn’t at our age? Her hair cut to barely reach her shoulders, shot through with silver. Sun-browned face a little more deeply lined at the corners of her big brown eyes and along the sides of her mouth. A flat-brimmed hat against her back, suspended by a stampede string round her neck. Still packing that .44, by God.

  She propped one boot on the bar rail and rested her hand on the bar. Said to the barman, “Whatever my friend is having,” and he poured her a mescal. We raised glasses, Boon and me, and clinked them together before downing our liquor and ordering another round. We got drunker than Cooter Brown that night, rehashing old stories and telling each other all the new ones worth telling, half of which were made up out of whole cloth. Spent a couple years in Chile, she told me, where things weren’t much different than the Territories used to be, only prettier. Told her about the time I accidently foiled a bank robbery in Beeker’s Hope, Montana when I recognized one of the gang right outside and called out to him just as he was pulling the bandana over his face. We slapped backs and laughed a lot, cried a little. I didn’t mind. Not with her.

  After the Mex closed up shop, we took a bottle back to the hotel I temporarily called home and whooped it up until the wife of the owner came pounding on the door to simmer us down. In the quiet of the wee dark hours before morning, we finally talked about Meihui. Turned out Boon buried the girl her ownself someplace in the High Sierra known only to her. Dug the grave, filled it back in, marked it in a way nobody would ever notice so as to ensure the kid never got disturbed.

  “I have visited three times since,” she told me. “She’s still there. She’s fine. Resting.”

  I nodded and she softly wept. I had an inkling there were some other hurts in there, pains from the time between then and now, but I kept my mouth shut and put an arm around her shoulders. To my surprise, Boon leaned into me and let me hold her a while, even after she was all cried out. Just a couple of gray old killers, sharing the pain they largely brought down upon themselves.

  I never did clearly remember passing out that night, but I did recall telling her that I had always loved her before I did.

  “I know, Edward,” she said. “I always knew.”

  And that was good enough for me. She was, of course, long gone when I rose late into the morning. I sat on the edge of the bed a long time, savoring those last hours. I could still smell her on my clothes, on the linens. Still feel her in my arms.

  A couple fingers remained in that bottle of mescal the Mex sold me the night before, so I finished that off for breakfast, flattened my hair with my hands as best I could, and stumbled downstairs to settle up for the room before heading
off again. It was getting warm, and I had never been to Minnesota but I met a drummer on a stage once who called that northerly clime home and invited me to drop in should I ever find my way that far north. Seemed like an idea.

  After that, I couldn’t say. Mayhap in another eight or ten years I’d run across Boon again. I knew it would take at least a couple more years before I stopped thinking about her each and every day. Until then, I enjoyed the thoughts. Most of them, anyway.

  A preview of

  VENGEANCE OF BOON

  Available Spring 2021

  Prologue

  Something on the order of four years had come and gone—some fast and some slow—since I’d last laid eyes on my old friend Boon when, in a wide place in the road called Sahuarita about halfway between Nogales and Tucson, I made the acquaintance of Lily Contreras.

  I have little doubt that you have heard tell of her.

  I hadn’t been in the Arizona Territory that time around long enough to make up my mind about staying or leaving, but I was pretty decisive about the poor beer and even worse whiskey I was putting back at the bar in a roadhouse that had no name I knew of. It was into that same roadhouse that Lily came into my life, however briefly, just long enough to drink me under the table and tell me a thing or three about old Boonsri Angchuan.

  The last I’d seen of her had been up in the northern part of California, just days after she and I finally tracked down the worthless son-of-a-bitch who sired her, a man she dutifully killed in the bowels of a depleted placer mine in a forgotten ghost town name of Handsome Frank. I can’t say for sure or for certain how that killing affected her, but I do know the moment her soon-to-be-dead father killed a young girl we thought we had rescued from a Barbary Coast hook shop, Boon changed. The kid’s name was Meihui. She was a good kid, and I am forced to confess I get all broken up about it all over again any time I remember her small, sweet face. For Boon’s part, I reckon that day just about broke her, period.